Blog Comments & Posts

These queries also hit advertisers - falsifying the number of "real" impressions that advertisers see and lowering their CTRs unnaturally.

Regarding scaping and its impact on CTR, it may be possible in Google to construct the scraping URLs requested to preclude any negative impact. Unfortunately, I can't vouch 100% for implementing this in a large scale, scraping context. From Google:

Google now provides a way for you to preview ads and search results as they would appear on a regular Google search results page – without impacting your metrics.
To perform a test search query, simply append the Google search results page URL with '&adtest=on.' For example, the search results page URL for the query 'send flowers' is http://www.google.com/search?&q=send+flowers. To see the search results page for the query 'send flowers,' without registering an impression, you can use http://www.google.com/search?&q=send+flowers&....
This feature is also helpful for locating your client's regionally targeted ad. To preview search results and ads as they'd appear in other geographical locations, you can add additional parameters after '&adtest=on.' Here's a list of parameters and links to more information about possible values for each parameter:
- Target country: use '&gl=aa,' where aa is the country code as listed at http://www.google.com/apis/adwords/developer/....
- Target region: use '&gr=bb-bb,' where bb-bb is the region code as listed at http://www.google.com/apis/adwords/developer/....
- Target city: use '&gcs=c,' where c is the name of a city. If you use the city parameter, the region parameter must also be set to the region containing the city. For example, to see a search results page for the query 'wedding planner' for users in New York City, the URL would be http://www.google.com/search?&q=wedding+plann...York.
- Target latitude and longitude: use '&gll=latitude,longitude,' where the latitude and longitude values are specified in micro-degrees. For example, '&gll=37304332,-121393872.'
- Target postal code (US only): use '&gl=US&gpc=nnnnn,' where nnnnn is any 5-digit US postal code. To use this parameter, the 'gl' parameter must be set to the United States (gl=US). However, please note that you cannot target ads to postal codes at this time.
- Target DMA (US only): use '&gm=ddd,' where ddd is the US Metropolitan Region code as listed at http://www.google.com/apis/adwords/developer/....
Last, please keep in mind that if you click on the 'next' arrow to see results showing on the following pages, you will need to append the location parameter again.